Macron ¯

The Macron character (¯) is a standard HTML entity defined in the HTML specification. In HTML source code, it can be written using the named entity reference ¯, the decimal numeric character reference ¯, or the hexadecimal numeric reference ¯. The character is assigned Unicode code point U+00AF in the Universal Character Set.

The macron (¯) is a diacritical mark consisting of a horizontal line placed above a letter. It indicates a long vowel in many languages and romanization systems (ā, ē, ī, ō, ū). In mathematics, the macron over a variable indicates a mean value or conjugate. The standalone macron is a spacing character.

Symbol entities encompass a wide variety of special characters used in legal disclaimers, intellectual property notices, typographic ornaments, card suit indicators, and miscellaneous notation throughout web content. These characters appear in website footers for copyright notices, product pages for trademark symbols, academic papers for dagger footnote markers, and decorative or gaming contexts for card suits and stars.

When deciding how to encode the Macron character in your HTML documents, the named entity ¯ is generally the most readable choice for developers reviewing or maintaining source code. The decimal form ¯ and hexadecimal form ¯ are equally valid alternatives that work in contexts where named entities may not be supported, or when generating HTML output programmatically from server-side code. All three representations produce identical visual output in every modern web browser.

Use the macron in discussions of diacritical marks, romanization of Japanese (rōmaji), Hawaiian language content, and mathematical notation for mean values (x̄). For actual macron-accented letters, use precomposed Unicode characters when available rather than combining the standalone macron.